Polish ex-PM denies knowledge of US prison

POLISH ex-prime minister Leszek Miller has disputed a US newspaper report that the CIA paid $US15 million ($A17.17 million) to Poland's intelligence agency for permission to set up a secret prison to interrogate terror suspects.

"I don't know anything about this money," said Miller, who has consistently disputed the existence of a secret CIA prison in northeast Poland.

A Washington Post story described how two senior CIA officers arrived in early 2003 in Poland to pick up $US15 million from the US embassy in Warsaw and deliver it across town to the headquarters of Polish intelligence.

The cash, carried in a cardboard box, was received by a man identified by the Post as Colonel Andrzej Derlatka, then-deputy chief of the Polish intelligence service, and two of his associates, according to former CIA officials who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity.

The Post article and the details about the money, which have not been reported before, will become part of ongoing investigations in Poland into the controversial program, said a spokesman for the state's attorney in Krakow.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he hoped it would not be proven that there had been "ambiguous" financial dealings by foreign intelligence services on Polish soil.

The secret prison in Poland was one of three so-called black sites that the CIA operated in Europe, where they interrogated suspects with waterboarding and other harsh practices seen as torture by many critics.

The others were in Lithuania and Romania.

In April 2013, a nonpartisan US task force convened by the Constitution Project, a nonprofit think tank, concluded that it was "indisputable" that terror suspects were tortured at these sites, and with the knowledge of then-US president George W Bush.

In December, a case was brought against Poland at the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of two men now held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The two men said they were taken by the CIA in December 2002 to Poland and held for several months at a site identified in a Council of Europe report as the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base.

The case in Strasbourg centres on Poland's role in their "rendition," as the transfer of terror suspects for interrogation in other countries became known.

The detainees accuse Poland of "knowingly and intentionally" allowing the CIA to hold them incommunicado, without any legal basis, for periods of six and nine months.

The White House declined to comment on the Washington Post story and said that it has not and "will not" confirm any purported locations of CIA black sites.

In February 2013, a New York-based rights organisation, The Open Society Justice Initiative, named 54 countries that either hosted secret prisons or helped in the transport or torture of terror suspects.

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